Interpretation of Characteristics of the Land Use Change Based on Chronological Satellite Imageries of Kharga Oasis, Western Desert, Egypt

Abstract

Since the 1990s, the Egyptian government has embarked on two national projects on settlement and agricultural development in the Western desert in preparation for expected future population growth. One of them is the Toshka irrigation project, which carries water from Lake Nasser through the depression of El Kharga towards Farafra Oasis. Another is the East Oweinat project, which has enlarged agricultural land in the south of the Western desert by developing water resources from underground aquifers of Nubian sandstone.
This paper focuses on the El Kharga Oasis, which has had its own water source since ancient days, to extract characteristics of the land use change of the western desert area in conjunction with the two national projects from Landsat chronological data of the last three decades. Land coverage was classified by conducting brightness adjustment using bands 7, 4 and 3, and the classification process was based on the k-means method in advance.
Against the background of political unrest in recent years, the area of Toshka Lake is shrinking, and agricultural land development area in the Toshka region has become unstable. The land use change of Kharga Oasis in the past 30 years has shown gradual increases of date palm and acacia grove areas (1.5 % per year on average), fields and/or pastures with dense palm trees (1.8 % per year), fields and/or pastures with scarce palm trees (0.6 % per year), and crop fields (0.9 % per year), with somewhat greater increases of fallow fields (2.3 % per year on average) and abandoned fields and residential areas (2.6 % per year). The extensive land use characterized by the expanding pasture may drastically change in the future by the extension of the Toshka waterways. Kharga Oasis, with its rich archaeological resources, and now its moderate economic base for settlement, may once again experience high population growth in the northeast direction.